1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention relates to website interaction, specifically to a framework for persistent user interactions within web-pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet provides the worldwide community a forum within which users from around the globe can engage in social networking, research, special interests, gaming and electronic commerce. Web sites serve as hosts, in essence, of users looking for, or engaging in particular interests.
Many sites provide their users with opportunities to interact with other users of their web-pages. For example, bulletin boards and web logs (blogs) are a forum for threaded conversations, whereby comments are temporarily preserved on a web-page for future visitors. However, bulletin boards and blogs are static tools, and do not give users a live, interactive experience.
Further, while interactions such as blogs and live chats are preserved, these static tools do not enable a user to readily identify interactive content relevant to only a segment of a web-page. For example, a news web site may list a number of stories, with pictures on one web-page. While a blog may capture relevant comments on a story or picture of interest, blog comments are typically located at the bottom of web-pages, and the comments are associated with the blog article as a whole and do not readily identify which element of the web-page is being discussed.
Some sites, such as e-commerce sites, provide limited opportunities for live interaction, such as a chat with a customer service representative to select a product, or with a technician to help solve a problem with a product. Some tools are available to even allow visitors of the same site to interact in real-time using chat and voice tools.
However, these interactions are not preserved for future third-party users of the web-page. Accordingly, future users can not readily avail themselves of an interaction that could provide real value, such as a future user with an interest in the same product, or a future user with an interest in a topic covered in a chat between two previous users.
In websites that do have interaction, the mechanism for interacting is supplied by the website itself. If the website owner does not provide a method of interacting with other users on the site, a visitor to the site has no recourse in the case they wish to discuss an aspect of the page.
Additionally, where a web-page offers a live chat to its users, the live chat is typically open to all users on that site, and the interactions are unrestrained, leading to content that serves no practical interest to many users of the web-page.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a framework for persistent user interactions within web-pages.